Wow, those 270 days went by
fast. But it’s true, my first marathon is just
five days out. Time to dust off the cob webs on this blog and update
my four or so readers.

I’m right in the taper phase of my marathon training, for which I’ve logged
775km since the beginning of 2015. This is the most I’ve ever run in my life,
logging consecutive 200km months for January, February and March. What’s more,
I’ve been able to do this without taking time off due to injury, and I
have to thank coach Scott Fishman
for that. In fact, since I started working with Coach Scott, my only
time off was the vacation
in September 2014.

Progress

In the meantime, I ran a great half-marathon in San Diego in November 2014 (I
might or might not write a race report, depending on how bored I get
during the rest of the week), improving my PR by over three minutes to 1h31’19”. Earlier this year,
I also ran a 10k race in preparation for the marathon and had another huge PR
for that (improving by over two minutes to 39’33”).

With these successes in my back I feel confident and excited about the
upcoming challenge of running a marathon.

Goals

I’ve been disclosing my goals to family and friends since end of last year; I
have a C goal (more or less: finish), a B goal, and an A goal. I won’t tell you
the exact numbers (I’ll do if we meet in person), let’s just say that
exceeding my B goal slightly will theoretically get me into the Boston
Marathon, whereas my A goal will have a solid buffer for a BQ. I’ll leave it
at that and you can try to figure out the goals by yourself.

I will disclose though that my A goal has been adjusted by coach Scott by
about five minutes (faster) since January. I blame the preparation 10k result
for that.

What’s left

Well, first of all, stay healthy and finish the taper (three runs left).
Second, get there. The family and I will be traveling to Hamburg on Friday
afternoon. That leaves Saturday for bib pickup, the shakeout run and calming
the nerves. Third, toe the line.

Fourth, write about the experience (and do a better job at that than with the last
three races).

If you happen to run in Hamburg as well, please leave a comment below, I’d
love to meet you before/after.

I’m a technology geek. I love my gadgets and I like to delve into the
numbers those gadgets record while I run or bike. All the more I get
frustrated when devices don’t work as I expect them to.

On today’s easy 60 minute run my Garmin FR610 locked up right after showing the 3km
split. I didn’t immediately notice this (not that I could have done anything),
and when I looked the watch the next time, this is what it showed:

Not knowing what had happened, I tried to make that black box go away by
hitting a couple of buttons, but none worked. Even holding the
power-button for a long time (long enough that the unit would normally turn
off) didn’t do anything. Kinda frustrated I continued to run.

Now, for reasons unrelated to this blog post (and also unrelated to the error),
I had a 20 minute alarm set on the watch. And surprisingly, this alarm went
off every 20 minutes, which made me realize that the watch wasn’t entirely
dead.

To cut a frustrating story short, upon arriving home I had the bright idea to
hook the watch up to the charger, which at least produced the usually “I’m now
charging” beep. Also, hitting the lap button or stop button produced the
corresponding beeps again, alas the screen still stayed in its locked
black-box mode. As a desperate last resort, I tried to power off the device
(hint: if you hold the power-button long enough the device will power down
without your answer on the “Power down? Yes/No” prompt). Surprise, surprise,
the watch finally powered down.

Upon restarting the watch all went back to normal. The exercise data of the
run was mostly gone (more specifically: the summary was there, but wrong in
terms of mileage, of course, and the run was cut off at 3km, right when the
watch locked up), but at least the Garmin wasn’t completely bricked.

So, if you came here because you experience(d) something similar, leave a
comment and let me know how you were able to solve the lock-up? Did charging
and rebooting the Garmin help?

Update October 14, 2014: Today my Garmin FR610 locked up again, also
right after showing a lap-split, with exactly the same symptoms as described
above. Again I was able to “revive” the watch by hooking it up to the
charger and then rebooting it. In order to prevent future encounters with this bug
I decided to do a hard reset (thereby deleting all history, not an easy step
to take). I hope this cures this issue for the time being.

In lieu of the 4x7 review, which would have been due on August 29, this
vacation notice has to suffice.

As you might have noticed by the relative quietness of this blog, I was on
vacation for the most part of August. We’ve done a nice 5-day trip to London,
where we did al of the ususal: sight-seeing, pub visits, getting
rained on, and of course, running.

Then, after spending a day at home, washing, drying, folding and repacking
clothes, we went up into the mountains to a small self-supported cottage that
the family owns. That meant carrying all the food for 10-12 days for the four
of us. I did two trips of this 90 minute hike on the first day and another one
a few days later when my brother-in-law came to visit.

To be honest, before these two weeks I was at a point in my run training that
made me almost regret taking about two weeks off from running (after all, in
the mountains, no running happens). On the other hand, soaking in views like
this above quickly made up for it. While the weather wasn’t always
great we did get some nice hikes in and I went out pretty much every day to gather
mushrooms – a highly meditative activity!

I’d estimate we pulled more than 5kg of mushrooms out of the forest and had
them prepared in many different ways (together with the eggs for breakfast,
just solo with some bacon for lunch or in a risotto for dinner). Fresh
mushrooms every day!

All in all, a great three weeks and I’m now back at the grind, preparing for
fall racing and my spring marathon!

I stumble over quite a lot of interesting articles and some are worth
sharing on this site. I plan to do this every 5 weeks (thus “5x7 Review”)
and I will include my own posts, some training highlights and some of my
nutrition. Enjoy!

As seen on runbikeco.de

Notable past training

For the first time ever, I’ve completed a month with over 200km of running.
July saw me run 201km in 26 sessions. The best part: this came just natural, I
didn’t really notice how coach Scott brought me to this distance. Many easy
runs sprinkled with some workouts and I’m more pain-free than ever before.

The bad part about it? I had zero (0!) kilometers on the bike. It just didn’t
fit, because on the days where I had time usually the weather wouldn’t
cooperate, and then when the weather was great I was busy with my running
shoes. Especially in the middle of July, where I ran a 10km race (yay, new PR of 41’49”)
and didn’t want to have tired legs from riding my bike.

Upcoming training

I’ll be on vacation for the most part of the next three weeks, but I will see
to get a couple of runs in (for at least 10 days that’s not possible though,
as we’ll be in the mountains without running trails or anything). However,
that’s the beauty of working with a coach, I’m confident that he’ll get me
back into the rhythm in no time.

Food consumed

I won’t bore you with everything I ate during the past four weeks, but there
is always a meal or two that was special.

It’s BBQ season! As I write this, my first ever pulled pork is on the grill,
can’t wait to taste it. In the last four weeks, we’ve had burgers, and fish,
and burgers, and steak, and, oh did I tell you I love summer BBQ?

Found elsewhere

With that, have a great four (or five) weeks ahead. And remember, you can subscribe to this blog via Atom as well as Feedburner.
And if you prefer email over RSS, subscribe to my newsletter.
Thanks for reading!

Which got favoured by @Sisu. Not knowing
who/what that was I opened their website (yep, I’m that easy to link-bait).
Turns out, Sisu is a web-service that lets you
create prints of your workouts based on the data found on Strava or Runkeeper. You
can customize the prints for color, the title, and whether to show the summary
in miles or kilometers. As of this writing, it will automatically pull the
data for 2013, but I’ve had a nice Twitter chat with one of the guys behind
Sisu and more customization options are in the pipeline.

At first I wasn’t sure whether to order a real print or not. As you can see
above, I run a lot on the same routes, which make for some repetitive
patterns. Also, the two track workouts kinda stand out. On the other, this is
what my training looks like, therefore I decided to spend the 40£ and order
the real thing. After all, services like this only survive (and thus continue
to add features) if there are paying customers!

After a couple of days the order shipped from the print company and arrived safe and
intact at my house. The print is about 41cm x 29cm in size and looks really
good. I will get it framed and probably put it on the wall in the staircase at
home.

I can’t wait for more features to show up on the site, especially to be able to
select a date range for the workouts, or to limit the selection to either runs
or rides as well as maybe deselect certain workouts. Once the date selection
is available I’m pretty sure I’ll get another print for 2012 and 2014,
subsequently. I think the sequence will look pretty nice in the staircase.

I’m in no way affiliated with Sisu, I just happened to find the concept
cool and thus ordered a print. If you find your training to be art-worthy,
then head over to Sisu and see how it would
look like.

Just a short post today before leaving for a father-and-son-camping weekend.
I’ve registered for my first marathon!

When I started running again in earnest back in 2012, my inner nerd came up
with the idea to run my first marathon at the age of 42. Well, I’ll turn 42
next year and so I registered for my first marathon.

On April 26, 2015 I will thus run the Haspa Marathon Hamburg. By
making it public on the blog and with friends and family I’m building up
enough peer pressure to actually do it. Today is a good day to post about it,
because the marathon is exactly 275 days away.

If you follow me on Twitter or read my
previous 4x7 Review closely,
you might have noticed that I’m working with a coach again. I find the idea of
running a marathon pretty daunting and therefore thought it might be a good
thing to let a professional develop the training-plan for me. Since the
beginning of June I’m a member of the Team All-American led by Coach
Scott Fishman. So far, this has worked out
very well and I’m confident that Scott will prepare me well for my first
marathon.

If you want to follow along, you can do so on Strava,
Instagram, and of course
Twitter. Oh, and I’ll be posting training
updates and stuff on this very blog.
As always, I’d be grateful for comments and words of encouragement.

I stumble over quite a lot of interesting articles and some are worth
sharing on this site. I plan to do this every 4 weeks (thus “4x7 Review”)
and I will include my own posts, some training highlights and some of my
nutrition. Enjoy!

As seen on runbikeco.de

Notable past training

I finished the month of June with 139km running in 21 training sessions. I did
run the 3000m track race I mentioned in the last review, and boy, that was
hard. But the PR streak is still alive, 11:14.25 minutes for 3000m; it was an
automatic PR, because it was my first 3k race ever.

Bike-wise, I ended up having 4 rides with a total of 325km. Another planned
long ride didn’t happen due to rainy weather, and for July it doesn’t look
promising either (there is a 10km road race on July 20, and I won’t do any
long ride before that for obvious reasons).

Upcoming training

That’s the beauty of working with a coach
again: I don’t know what’s coming up, except for this week’s race.

Happy Fourth of July for my American readers! The Tour starts
tomorrow and that’s a good opportunity (as good as any other, to be fair)
to write about my bikes. Since I have two road bikes, I’ll start with the
older one.

Back when I started with Triathlon
I bought this bike at a local bike shop, which got recommended to me. At the
time it was pretty expensive, even though I don’t remember the exact amount I
paid. But I do remember that I had to work a full summer for it and get
additional “sponsorship” from my parents. But then it was mine:

It was equipped with a Shimano RX100 groupset (that’s one down from the
classic 105), with down-tube shifters, a 7-speed cassette (11-23 if I
remember correctly) and a 42/53 “biopace” chain-ring combo (“biopace”
meaning slightly oval chain-rings). It came with Matrix 700C ISO C11 rims,
which had a slight aero-profile.

I upgraded the rear-hub to a Shimano 600 at some point, because I had a second
rear-wheel designated for riding on the trainer and used the 105 equipped
wheel for that.

I rode this bike for all of my triathlon seasons (three, all in all) and after I
stopped doing triathlon races I remember one year during university where I
got back on the bike for a few rides. After that, it sat in my attic, for
years.

In 2010, when I picked up riding again, I had the bike checked by a local bike
shop and they were surprised about the good shape it was in. All it needed was some lube, new
cables for the brakes, a new saddle and new pedals (because I also got new
shoes which had different cleats), and I was good to go.

Vintage Riding

I still ride this bike these days, usually at the beginning of the cycling season
or if the weather gets bad at the end of the season. In the meantime, I’ve
upgraded the old wheels with new Ultegra rims, which came off my new Trek Madone (bought in
2012, more on that later) and had the bar tape redone. Other than that, it still
has its original RX100 components, as you can see:

And it is still a damn fine bike to ride!

Thanks for reading and enjoy your long weekend ahead! If you happen to have a vintage Trek bike,
too, please leave a comment! Or if you don’t have one, but would like one,
comment as well. Or you can also comment just because!

Welcome!

Hi, my name is Henrik. I’m a Software Guy by trade and recently (in 2010) started to ride my
bike again.
And then winter came along and I wanted to stay fit. Therefore I started to run
again.

While riding or running I let my mind wander and noticed a desire to write stuff down. That’s what this blog
is for. I hope I can provide amusing stories, sprinkled with some useful information and the occasional
product recommendation.

My other passion is writing code. Even if I don’t have nearly as much opportunity to write code every day
due to my management-style position, I still need a place to write about my findings and code-adventures. That
would be the co.de part of the blog.

For a somewhat longer story as to why I “started” running and riding again, I recommend to
read my introduction.